Return Value

If the source XML is indented, setting the PreserveWhitespace flag in options causes the reader to read all white space in the source XML. Nodes of type XText are created for both significant and insignificant white space.

If the source XML is indented, not setting the PreserveWhitespace flag in options causes the reader to ignore all of the insignificant white space in the source XML. The XML tree is created without any text nodes for insignificant white space.

If the source XML is not indented, setting the PreserveWhitespace flag in options has no effect. Significant white space is still preserved, and there are no spans of insignificant white space that could cause the creation of more white space text nodes.

The line information is accurate immediately after loading the XML document. If you modify the XML tree after loading the document, the line information may become meaningless.

LINQ to XML's loading functionality is built upon XmlReader. Therefore, you might catch any exceptions that are thrown by the XmlReader.Create overload methods and the XmlReader methods that read and parse the document.

The following example loads an XElement from a StringReader in two different ways: preserving white space, and not preserving white space. It then uses a query to determine the number of white space nodes in the resulting XML tree.